by James Meek
Alex was woken in the night by someone coming into his room. He switched the light on as Harry sat down on the edge of his bed. He was in pyjamas and a dressing gown and had a glass of wine in his hand. Alex asked what time it was, and when he asked it, realised the question he’d wanted to ask was ‘How old am I?’
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ said Harry.
‘How do you feel?’
‘Excellent.’
‘Different?’
‘The river cannot enclose the same foot twice. Do you mind if I sleep here?’
‘Yes.’
Harry knocked back a gulp of wine. ‘You’re selfish. And you’re going to bloody Africa tomorrow.’
‘You don’t need me here. You’ve got Judith now, and Matthew will be coming and going, and so will I. When I get back I’m going to move out for a while. I’ll rent a place close by.’
The corner of Harry’s mouth turned down and he looked into his glass. ‘Matthew snitched on me, I suppose. He told you about the house. Don’t those Christians have some kind of commandment about not ratting on their elders? I’m not going to change my mind. If he tries to make me I’ll leave the house to you outright.’
‘I wouldn’t take it.’
‘Children aren’t what you think,’ said Harry. ‘He’s more disappointed in me and his mother than I am in him. He’s my son and I have the will to choose the child I like the best and it happened to be you. It could have been Dougie. It could have been a kid off the street.’ He looked up, gave Alex the chance to speak, and when Alex said nothing, only blinked at him and went on. ‘You have children – who knows? You treat them like princes and princesses, you tuck them up at night in soft beds, you spend your last penny on them, you teach them everything you know, you love them and tell them how wonderful they are, and they turn into liars and whores and thieves. They betray you. Or you smack them about the head, put them to work when they’re six, starve them, abuse them, tell them they’ll never amount to anything, and they make it their university. They flower. They rule the world.’
40
Bec sent a car to collect Alex from the airport in Dar es Salaam. He hadn’t slept on the overnight flight from London. On the way to the villa where Bec’s group was based his eyes ached and his head spun. In the streets he had a muffled sense of diesel fumes, criss-crossing streams of motorbikes, searing light and black shade. The sense of journey’s end gave him a hollow, adrenaline wakefulness.
She was busy. She met him with a distracted smile and a kiss on each cheek and they talked with awkward formality in her cluttered office. The heavy old desk – some colonial antique, he supposed – impressed him with its varnished darkness and in his disappointment he instinctively wrote off his new power and fame and threw together a hallucinatory architecture of Bec’s psychic estate, vast, aristocratic and fortified, into which he’d slipped by chance, and might easily be found out: her neo-imperial set-up in Africa, great project, researchers, local staff, famous and powerful brother in England, former lovers, and she, the mistress at the heart, aloof. Batini came to show him his room. Bec said she’d be finished at four and he sloped off with his luggage, to sleep.
Bec had hoped to finish the vaccine trial by the time Alex came; she’d looked forward to seeing him. But in the end there were still villages to go round with questionnaires and booster shots. When he appeared in her office, pale and tired from his journey, filling space with his long limbs at rest, she felt a shiver of nerves, if it was nerves. The sleepless flight had taken away his fidgety restlessness and she saw a stooped, brooding man harrowed by excessive emotional algebra. He looked at her, she thought, with curiosity naked of decorum, as if she were nature itself.
Bec found it hard to concentrate on the way to the villages, when she’d meant to chew on some data on the laptop in the back of the car. She’d taken trouble to shove necessary tasks into earlier and later days and arranged for the other researchers to be out in the districts so she and Alex could have one evening to themselves. For the rest of the time, she’d collected brochures for him about safaris and Kilimanjaro. Why, she wondered, hadn’t she told him this? And why stand behind the ugly old desk in her office, as if she were interviewing him?
He must have imagined she was afraid of him, or putting on a performance of authority. She knew he hadn’t come for a jolly walk and dinner and to post pictures of zebras on the Facebook page he never touched. She searched for the memory that the worn-out, not-giving-up Alex echoed with. Her father at the end of a day spent clearing fallen branches from the coomb, or had that been Ritchie? Joel sitting on the tailgate of the car, head between his knees, after failing to place at the cross country in Crystal Springs? Or her favourite engraving of Don Quixote from the old edition in her grandfather’s house? That’s him, she thought, the doleful, hopeful knight.
When she got back, before going to find Alex, she asked Batini’s opinion about her choice of earrings, and Batini discussed it with her very seriously.
Alex woke refreshed in a strange bed. It was late afternoon, he guessed. Over his head was a metal ring with a furled mosquito net. From where he lay he could see a rhomboid-shaped section of clear sky, a faintly inky yellow, that mysteriously had depth without having features. He’d forgotten his resentment that morning. He remembered Bec seeming distant, looked at his phone, saw that it was after five and hurried to wash and to dress in his new linen clothes.
He found her on a cane armchair on the verandah, waiting for him, it seemed. The evening chorus of birds and insects was beginning and the horns of mopeds rasped from the street. Beyond the trees at the bottom of the garden the concrete shell of a half-built apartment block turned a soft spider’s-web colour as the sun went down. She turned towards him and rose and her eyes and earrings glinted in the last of the daylight. She’d put her hair up. She began to speak and Alex heard but didn’t take the trouble to lay hold on the words of how did you sleep I’m sorry I didn’t wake you but you looked so peaceful it’s probably too late for the market but there’s a nice place down by the seafront where we can have a drink before dinner.
‘That sounds good,’ he said. He’d repeated to himself as he got ready that he must compliment her on the way she looked, however she looked. But now that she was in front of him whatever he could have told her about her appearance seemed cheap and beside the point. A few weeks ago he’d been told he was a leviathan of science, talked confidently on live national radio and global news channels, and gave presentations on cellular timekeeping to conference audiences of hundreds of people. Yet now the memory of his failure of eloquence and resolution in the rain in Cambridge was stronger.
‘Let’s sit here for a while,’ he said. He pulled another chair close to Bec’s and they sat down with his knees almost touching the hem of her cotton skirt, printed with a cherry blossom pattern. They asked each other catch-up questions until a taut bubble of unsaid things pushed between them.
‘I wonder what it is about a person that gives you a sense of what they are before you know them,’ Alex said. ‘It must be the way they look, and the way they move, I suppose. It’s not much to go on and I don’t remember being trained to do it.’
‘There are the things they say,’ said Bec.
‘Yes, and the things they do, but before that, there’s another language. You read it and you don’t know you’re reading it. It’s written in a fine script. The eyes are a millimetre wider, or narrower, the eyes a fraction brighter.’ Alex lifted his index finger and thumb together in front of his eye and squinted through it as if it were the eye of a needle. ‘The smile, the head, the way she holds herself.’
‘Oh, it’s a woman!’
‘These movements, these dimensions – they’re too minute and complex to measure.’
‘Would you want to?’
‘Beauty helps.’
‘There we go.’
‘But it’s not the thing itself. The thing itself is what’s encoded there and how you read it.’
‘Give me an example.’
‘A woman I’m thinking of. She is attractive, as it happens, and clever, but that’s not the thing. When I met her, and before I talked to her, I read in some way that her mind was wide open. You hear people say open-minded, I’m keeping an open mind and what they mean is they’re opening a little hatch in their closed minds and taking a look outside.’ He made a hinge with the heels of his hands together, swung his hands open and mimed a lookout. ‘This woman is different. She really has one. And the idea of a mind that actually is open is scary.’
Bec smiled. ‘You’re saying this woman has no restraints.’
‘I’m sure she does. But I don’t think she trusts them unless she made and tested them herself.’
‘You make this woman sound like some kind of pioneer in the wilderness of her own brain.’ She laughed.
‘You must know her,’ he said.
Bec was going to say that Alex saw what he wanted to see, but hesitated. It wasn’t so much that she liked what he said about her as that she liked to see him want to take her into an idea he’d made. Alex took his moment to lean forward to kiss her, and she responded, and for some time, before they were interrupted by one of the drivers coming to ask if they wanted the car, the crickets were drowned out by the creaking of hundreds of strands of woven cane.
They went out and got a little drunk and Bec told him how hard it would be to spend time with him after that night. ‘I’m nearly finished but there are ragged ends,’ she said. ‘I thought you could go on a safari. I don’t know if you’re interested in lions.’
‘Smug beasts,’ said Alex. ‘Complacent.’
‘They have zebras.’
‘Too retro, too Eighties.’
‘Leopards.’
‘Leopards are cliquey. Couldn’t I travel around with you? I could be your unpaid apprentice. I’m more on the theoretical than the practical side. Perhaps they’d be interested in quantum theory and protein folding out there in the countryside.’
‘We might find a space, I suppose,’ said Bec. ‘Dr Katanga needs a dogsbody.’
Later they drove up the coast and walked along a quiet beach. The few jagged white lights inland seemed to have nothing to do with human life. Their feet sank half an inch into wet sand and the darkness out at sea was warm, unflawed. Bec cut her bare foot on a white shell and bled and put her hand on Alex to help her limp along, hopping forward and letting him take her weight on his shoulder. She lay down laughing on the sand and he licked the blood off her foot and spat out the grains. They walked into the darkness and the water lapped around their ankles and Bec drew in breath and said that it stung. A single red light on the mast of a fishing boat ducked and rose in the swell offshore and they heard the distant clack of its old engine. They watched the light rise and fall, a pattern in the void.
‘I’m glad you came,’ said Bec.
After they first made love Bec noticed a strange trick of time, where the memory of the night split into two: her memory of what happened, and her memory of what it meant. She remembered details. She remembered his eyes, the rush in her chest, how his lips were softer than they looked, his back muscles stretching under her hand, his fingertips, the moment he pushed into her, her gasp, her laughing when she came, some of the things he said. None of these was the memory of what it meant: the beginning of a time when being with Alex for ever became something that would happen unless she stopped it.
One night, in the yard outside the villa, the generator started up. Alex turned his head and saw Bec asleep next to him. Her lips moved and she began to whisper, too faintly for him to make out the words, exposing the dark seam of things he didn’t know and experiences he couldn’t share because they’d already happened. Her whispers must bubble up from the same source as the blood dried in the pinpricks in her fingertips, the scars on her wrist and the microscopic creatures living in her veins, towards which he felt a queer rivalry. Suppose happiness were luck, as Harry said; his luck was so solidly embedded in the woman next to him that should he lose her now he couldn’t imagine being lucky again.
He wanted to stay with her, and he wanted a child with her. In some part of him he was aware how much unhappiness lay ahead if, as was quite likely, he could have one but not the other, and yet he managed to keep that part of himself sealed off from the part of his mind that made plans.
When he’d left London he was so drenched in accolades that for a while he saw his chronase complex theory bowling forward into eternity, passing from generation to generation as resolutely as any gene set, like a virtual child. But Africa struck him with its youth and its intent. He saw the daily tide of children in uniform walking to and from school and wanted to stake a claim. Through Bec he should have lived malaria day and night yet he was oddly blind to the disease and hunger, the cruelty of the daily strive and hustle, the dullness of being poor. To Alex, Tanzania was flowering. To come from the fat, spoiled, ageing north to Africa and find Bec was like coming from the world of scientists into Ritchie’s party and finding her among the musicians. She was his guide between the worlds.
Bec opened her eyes, smiled at him and stretched like a cat, pedalling the sheet off her body. She saw he was thinking about something, with a trace of the furrowed brow, as if he were about to make a judgement.
She was struck by how safe she felt and had the urge to give her ease a prod, to test it. ‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘You’re thinking, “I liked sex with her so much that I want to do it again with someone else just to make sure she’s the best.”’
He laughed, but the thoughtfulness came back.
‘What if you and I didn’t sleep with anyone else?’ said Alex. ‘For the rest of our lives?’
Bec considered the strange extremity of the proposition. She remembered how strange it was that it should seem strange. Most of her friends had made that promise to their partners. She didn’t like to be reminded that she was unusual. Ever since Joel, ever since Papua New Guinea, she’d worked longer hours than anyone around her, and when she felt like it, taken the sex that had come her way; since Val, the sex had fallen off. With the vaccine trial soon to wind up, she’d go back to London; would she end up spending nights in the lab again? She’d felt an arcane spasm of having been betrayed when her feminist friends, those most ardently for independence, polyandry, self-definition, had suddenly dived headfirst into permanent, monogamous domesticity. The betrayal wasn’t the dive; it was that they never admitted to making the choice, as if setting up house together were some extraordinary accident that they were making the best of.
She ran her hand down Alex’s spine, pressing her forefinger lightly into each vertebra as if she were counting them. ‘Would I have to read your work?’ she said. Even to discuss hypotheticals seemed a step towards consent.
‘You mean you haven’t?’ He was disappointed.
‘You don’t know the names of all the parasites.’
‘Try me,’ said Alex.
‘What’s the most famous parasite?’
Alex lifted his head from Bec’s breast. ‘The Queen.’
‘The cuckoo,’ said Bec. ‘It lays its egg in another bird’s nest and gets the parenting for free. Hey, don’t stop that, it’s nice.’
The mosquito net stirred as Alex sat up and looked at her keenly. One side of his body was illuminated by the security floodlights in the garden leaking through the gaps between the slats of the blind. ‘Perhaps those other birds wouldn’t have chicks any other way,’ he said.
One of the villages where Alex came to help was a prosperous, bleak place of cube-shaped mud-brick houses with the white render stained and crumbling away. The late afternoon sun gilded the villagers’ cheeks and flashed off rooftops’ unrusted spots when they walked towards the schoolhouse. The air smelled of fresh-lit charcoal. Bec looked back over her shoulder and saw Haji Katanga carrying a box of questionnaires and a few yards behind him Alex in a white shirt, pale grey jeans and dusty boots stepping carefully along with a tray of vaccine vials just out
of the cooler. He led a ragged V of children, dogs and chickens down the road between the houses. He was watching the vials to be sure he didn’t tip them over and Bec saw how he was distracted by the way the curls of frost vapour coming off them caught the reddening sun. His head bent lower and lower and he walked more and more slowly until he stopped and the children and dogs gathered round to see what had fascinated him. She saw him gradually become aware of their interest; try to explain, with enthusiasm; remember what he was supposed to be doing; look up at her encouragingly; lead the ragged procession rosily on.
‘Dr Katanga, your man is slacking,’ she said to Haji.
Haji looked over his shoulder, then shook his head at Bec. ‘You can’t get good labour these days,’ he said.
Later she looked up from the line of children and mothers to see Alex in the distance, standing around a tall local drum with a group of older boys. They were showing him how to play it and he shook his head, stopped them, held up two sticks he’d found and performed a drummer boy roll, and they shook their heads and stopped him and beat the drum with their hands, and he shook his head and stopped them, and so it went on.
In the last weeks of the vaccine trial Bec thought about the future and found that Alex was in it, and found she liked him being there. It was a luxury to lie naked, skin to skin, in the smell of sex, with a man who not only knew what she meant when she complained about the basolateral domain of the hepatocyte plasma membrane, but could reassure her that her work was worthwhile.
‘It’s like an epic poem,’ he said one night, bouncing slightly with enthusiasm as, more at ease with her, he’d begun to do. ‘The races of humans and haemoproteus on one side, the mosquitoes and malaria parasites on the other.’
‘Who’s in charge?’ said Bec.
‘You. In a plumed helmet, mounted on a great black horse, raising your mighty syringe, turning to the ranks stretching out on either side of you and calling on the bugler to sound the charge. Damn it, a spy in the camp! Did you hear that?’ He twisted round, clapped his hands in the air, examined his palms for insect guts and clapped his hands again, chasing the pulsing whine that had infiltrated their net.
